-Chapter 17-
Saint Petersburg was an explosion, a density of culture I’d been unable to convince myself dwelled behind the Iron Curtain of American history classrooms and evening news programs. Crossing the border had been smoother and less dramatic that expected; they questioned me for perhaps fifteen minutes in a yellow room with peeling paint and several portraits of Lenin and Stalin looking bored and sinister on otherwise bare walls. They seemed satisfied with my explanation- a traveling American college student, though I nervously mumbled the details. When I told them plainly I had no business aspirations or ulterior motives in visiting the USSR, I breathed easily at not having to fabricate anything; at least anything complex.
My lungs contracted though; the sudden fear of freedom from attachment, from expectations- I was now truly floating. Max seemed distant, and I wondered if I’d pushed him into this realm, or if it was just the way it was meant to be and was working it’s way towards all along. The realm of underground culture amongst the young Soviet’s was unprecedented- a deliciously subtle empire of art, of music, of film, of hopeless neoliberal wanting. Various other disciplines fell in around the cheap flats and secret clubs that littered the edges of the tidy grid of the inner city. Rubbish to the innumerable plutocrats; the creators of ‘Leningrad’ whose presence, as omniscient as it was, I refused to recognize. They were the massive sponge on liberty whose welfare benefits never quite replaced what they took, I decided, wondering if I was just being another stubborn American.
I was enamored with the endless blocks of gray apartment buildings, smug and enduring in their many interpretations of Gothic and Romantic virtue. When I’d stepped out of the Finlyandski terminal, I was immediately greeted by a steely bronze cast of Lenin. It was 3 or 4 meters high and neither a martyr for the proletariat nor the icon of revolution I’d expected. The artist had spoken, I sensed- I stumbled out of the terminal into the bright light of mid-morning and heard the strangled breath of expression in an expressionless state. I thought of how Da Vinci or Michelangelo had sewn the strange inflections of discontent into their work; the silent fist of empowerment held against the church and the state. I admired the statue for several more minutes. It was an effigy to the status quo, it seemed, a cast of Russian Communism’s quiet, unspectacular shortcomings, but it entranced me nonetheless. I thought of myself as an exiled pharaoh, a piece of a distant land both regal and obscure. I vowed to make Saint Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, the holy republic of frozen wealth what Bergen or Marseilles could have never been: personal. This was not the traditional fortress of rheumy-eyed babushka’s and fairytale Orthodox churches that Moscow was, but rather a decided intersection of east and west. It was a forum through which the disenfranchised youth of the icy interior, the Siberian mirages of vitality could migrate and perhaps create something new.
The first night I descended into an almost comatose sleep, lying on a deep, plush mattress in an ancient hotel I’d decided on. It was in an old, almost primitive section of the inner city, surrounded by buildings that would have seemed almost decrepit had they not carried the vague stature of age. The décor was traditional to the point of kitschy- I loved it, the unrecognized irony like a secret pact between this new, wanting-to-be lovely place and my lost self. I sat for some time by the grand Victorian windows of my room. Their edges were gilt in some inexorable metal, which crept over everything like ivy; I felt ensconced in its stuffy material protection. When I ventured out into the night I felt armed with this protection, this insulation from fear or destitute wandering of the ex-patriot. I held it tight around slim reddish corduroy pants and a thrift store Oxford; 3 buttons undone to reveal a strong, pale chest devoid of the hair or spottiness I’d unfairly associated with the hopelessly alcoholic and womanizing good old boys at Brown. Somehow, of course, I had to hide all this nervous projection under a few hardy outerwear layers. A down jacket and scarf not as clever as I’d hoped- but smart nonetheless. I enjoyed the silent half-recognition of strangers as I made my way to the nearest metro station. I felt the effervescent edges of the October Revolution in the night air. The way people held themselves tight as they walked- against the cold but also against an imperialistic state of a different nature than my own. They sought protection without ill consequence, like all people, all the people I spent my days I imagining.
I saw a group of perhaps a half dozen young men and woman walking ahead. They seemed familiar with the territory but also wary, like a rat emerged from underground, confident in its own survival but also aware of the omnipresent menace. They formed a tight little knot as they walked, their leather jackets and torn jeans decorated in a variety of patches and cloth insignia. Worn leather satchels and messenger bags hung askew from tall, indifferent frames. They bulged with books, cassette tapes- tangents from the underground. They split up to weave through oncoming human traffic along the busy sidewalk yet subconsciously reunited after the obstacle was passed, drunk on their own proximity. A few had small handmade-looking badges on their jackets demanding ‘Demokratizatsiya!’, whose boldness I admired silently. The new stilyagi- the ‘stylish ones’ who’d bucked against 1950’s Moscow autocracy with their endearingly inaccurate appropriation of American ‘greaser’ style.
I had no plans except perhaps to follow them- the museums were closed, the bars were mysterious, and the barriers of social ineptitude in a foreign land daunting and conducive to wandering alone, I thought. Inclusion was all about ‘otherness’, to be part of something you had to first be excluded from something else. I found myself subject to a perverse envy of their secret statement, the way they addressed a hostile state.
The hour of ultimatum [11 PM, in case you were wondering] was fast approaching, the hour from which the night would either explode or condense back into the confines of a late-19th century hotel room. I later learned from Irina it had in fact been built in 1913- her grandfather was one of the architects, and she thought that 1913 was generally believed to be the best and last great year in Russian history. I decided to follow them. They were too caught in their own creation to notice me anyways, I figured. We descended a long flight of broad stairs below amber streetlamps into the gaping, humid mouth of the metro, its veins pulsing with steel and Soviet art-deco vitality. A train arrived just as I managed to purchase a ticket from a fancy new automated machine, and I quickly followed them into a modern-looking car. It sped along in an uncertain direction, surprisingly busy for a Thursday evening. I reminded myself that the reality of transportation here was not as it seemed- this was not the land of American 4-car garage opulence, and most people relied on the massive state metro and bus system; their locomotive lifeblood.
The group laughed and prodded each other, their ringleader a cocky young man of perhaps 25, rail-thin and clad in sharp stripes and a jet-black leather jacket that sat under watchfully bespectacled eyes. His thick, dark hair was like bundles of thatch atop a defiant face; deeply set eyes that had seen the muddy paths of the Ural foothills with equality clarity as the Mariinsky Palace or the Kazan Cathedral, awash in its own Romanesque folly. The train wound its way through the labyrinth of Petrogradskaya Storona and when it slowed and the wheels squealed with sharp arrival, I followed them off. We were at Chkalovskaya, a station whose palatial caverns promised a protection from food shortages or moldy potatoes in the dead of winter, it seemed, though I knew it wasn’t so. I refused to let obvious the inequity of the rural masses and this tiny urban bourgeoisie taint my fascination with the USSR.
We exited swiftly and a few of the girls caught me ten meters or so behind them. They looked at me with curious indifference, one of them straightening her blouse and handbag seemingly for my eyes only. I always imagined attention when it was just as likely I’d thwarted it. Her lips were subversively luscious, bearing no makeup or false pretense, I thought. They seemed oblivious to me, or maybe just apathetic as I continued behind them. My pace was both hesitant and impatient, hiding nothing as we turned down the Boulevard Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, a monument in wordiness and eastern mystery.
The city lights sat trapped beneath the stout Baroque and Neoclassical eaves overhead, muting winter into something more tolerable. I saw Dostoyevsky’s modern disorder, the abstract intent he must have seen in this city. I loved it that much more; that it could be exotic without the threat of some tourist gulag the American media loved to purport. When they turned purposefully into a shabby-looking café, whose sign read ‘Illiterati’ in blocky English lettering, I was torn. I wanted my mother, my sister there to hold my hand, to tell me I’d done nothing wrong; that I was loved despite it all. The strength to be my own returned seemingly as fast as it had left though, and I felt resolved to keep on them. They seemed to know the owner and bypassed the little wooden counter for a collection of grandly decrepit Victorian sofa’s that recalled an 18th century Parisian Salon left outside to wither in the elements for a few centuries.
I ordered a coffee from the girl behind the counter, lost in silent admiration of things unseen and unheard; the warm air of stifled intellect, or perhaps free-flowing thoughts filled the air. I never wavered, never doubted my justification in following strange people through strange cities, but at times the weight of the unfamiliar night threatened to crush me. The distance between the group of young Anarchists or bored artists and myself seemed to remain fixed despite their business. Our eyes never meeting completely, just grazing off the edges of muffled intent. When I sat down across from them, the same girl who had first eyed me critically from the metro station stairs turned her head suddenly and addressed me in superb English. ‘Why have you been following us?’, she inquired. I wasn’t in the mood for fumbled apologies; I’d come too far for that. ‘You seemed interesting’, I replied flatly, trying not to allow my broad, toothy grin to spoil the sincerity of my statement. ‘We don’t fuck around with tourists’, the young man who seemed to be their leader replied, bits of beige latte foam comically strung across his thin, half-ironic mustache. His words would have seemed colder had he not been afflicted with same obvious curiosity I had. I suffered from the inability to reduce human interaction to cold necessity, to avoid attachment to places and people I’d never really know.
‘What has brought you to our lovely Soviet city?’, the leader continued in dripping sarcasm, and the others now were silent, understanding his place to speak amongst them. ‘I am a collector and dealer of rare gems and minerals’, I began to fabricate elaborately, my voice shaking slightly. Indeed I had mulled the idea beneath the icy crystal chandeliers of the hotel the night prior, and the idea of searching for frozen crystalline wealth had become increasingly virtuous sounding. ‘I have heard of the USSR’s vast natural wealth, the platinum nuggets of the Ural mountains, the brilliant crystals of topaz and heliodor from Murzinka, the rare treasures of Dal’Negorsk, and Sikhote Alin’, I continued. God, I probably sounded ridiculous. Indeed, all this was true, but I sensed the confusion and doubt in my new comrades. Perhaps they were not the beacons of revolutionary action I’d imagined. Rather, they approximated change in theory, their badges and ragged clothing a cry for identity- for existence outside the muddy rural paths from whence they’d come. ‘That is fascinating’, the young man said in a vague, insincere tone, ‘but I sense this is not the full history of your travels.’ His smile was now genuine and open, the others seemed to follow on cue, their mouths agape when mine was, filled with a wonder both profound and disaffected.
‘Surely you don’t wish to be bored with the trials of a stranger’, I protested meekly. ‘Who said you were a stranger? ‘You see these are the divisions the state, the television, the poison stew the propaganda besieges us with… when you can’t even tell your brethren from the masses.’ The others now turned their heads towards him, hiding smug contractions of their youthful faces. They sensed the ensuing diatribe and by the looks of it, it would be a familiar one. ‘He doesn’t need to hear all this, Fyodor’, the youngest and most impressionable looking of them piped up bravely. Fyodor laughed warmly and pushed her aside, the other picking up the new lightness of the conversation. ‘Go be useful and get me another coffee, Irina’, he said with humorous brusqueness, and turned again to me. ‘Girls these days, eh? If I didn’t think them smarter than men on the whole, I’d question their damn impunity more, especially that one, motioning as Irina stuck her minuscule silver of an ass their way in mock protest. I knew she wasn’t like that, wasn’t like them, which made it all the more interesting.
‘We are the Petrograd Arts and Democratization League, Fyodor said casually, as if aware of my lingering doubts as to their legitimacy. ‘Part of it’, a previously silent young man behind him corrected, and he smiled in a conciliatory way instead of reprimanding him. ‘You have to understand, my American friend, that Saint Petersburg, or as I like to call it Petrograd’ [the irony of a place renamed in multiples of human ego was lost on him perhaps, I thought to myself] ‘…is a great city, a confluence of culture and landscape unequalled in this part of the world, I’d like to think’, he continued boldly. ‘A fair statement that might be applied to many places in which one feels particular rootedness…’, I countered blandly. Sensing Fyodor’s slight deflation, I told him it was indeed a remarkable and inspiring place, and my brief time here had been ‘inspiring beyond my own motives.’ I felt I could converse in such bold, pretentious conflagration with this character; I was another oddity, a serious force to be reckoned with when he managed to tie all the loose edges together.
‘Its almost midnight, and as much as I’d like to think otherwise, I doubt my trip home will be as simple and direct as I’d like it to be’, I said. Fyodor gave me a critical look. ‘Is anything worthwhile simple or direct? Forgive what sounds like my lofty rhetoric, sitting here in some faux-bourgeoisie café, drunk on our own pale aesthetics.’ ‘But...’ Fyodor trailed off like a fuzzy car radio, suddenly regaining his former gusto with Irina’s return, coffee in hand. ‘But, follow us for a bit more, the bewitching hour is fast approaching, and I’m not talking about turning into a pumpkin, or whatever you Americans learn in your sheltered suburban youth.’ When he brought his head back in a hollow laugh, I saw the scars. Long pink tendrils of matted skin were strung across his strong neck and upper shoulders, where the edges of his torn sweater receded. I imagined him in some forgotten village in the Ural foothills, his drunken father beating him mercilessly as he held the dull paper stub of the government welfare check, never enough to cover their sad delirium. ‘We are going to Kresty’, Fyodor said flatly, and I shivered unconsciously with the word, the slight knowledge he had of the notorious Soviet prison, overcrowded with political and social victims of untold repression whose consequences were as absurd as they were real.
I was torn, it was late, I was tired; tired of the comfort of an American privilege I simultaneously rejected and clung to. ‘I will go with you’, I stated firmly. The others murmured in hushed Russian between themselves, but I still felt kinship in their collective ‘otherness’, and they left the café with a nod and slight bow to the owner, who stood trapped behind his little wooden desk. I was aware of our path it seemed, as if we had some sort of perverse routine, yet I was unable to comment. We traveled in bold silence to the prison, the cityscape vast and unfolding into the dark creases of the night. The seemingly steady and monotonous height of the buildings was unbroken across the horizon, not a steel and glass tower in sight. We took the metro to a far corner of the main island, a district of warehouses and ancient crumbling forts, or perhaps they were government outposts, it was difficult to pry purpose out of the massive gray rectangles, squat and indignant against each other. After 3 or 4 blocks of walking through the monolithic brick canyons, we reached the western edge of the complex. It was huge and impenetrable looking, a collection of buildings obviously evolved over the years into the current maze of walls and corridors. God didn’t live here, he had been done away with by the state, and for this I felt a shameful admiration. The aim of the now supposedly empowered proletariat had been so smart and progressive, to form a world free of metaphysical excuses for intolerance. To live in a world where colors were bold and obvious, black and white, right and wrong, wasn’t that nice? The reality was too bleak and obvious to merit further thought, and instead I selfishly imagined myself here, what they might do an American caught in an attempted crime.
We ducked into a narrow space between the curling steel perimeter fence and a sort of backdoor gate. A narrow brick-lined passageway illuminated under a single deathly incandescent bulb, naked like an eye out of its socket on an overhead light post. I heard it first as a single note, a barely audible wail. Soon it transfixed me, shouts and murmurs mixed into the persistent stirring for freedom behind the blank wall we faced. Fyodor lead us into a little alcove. It was strewn with trash and cigarette butts, a cracked Vodka bottle sitting discontent in a gray puddle. A small portal broke the otherwise singular façade of the main barracks western wall in front of them. It seemed incongruous, an architectural mistype, perhaps, but Fyodor seemed to know its secrets, and he eyed it with nervous anticipation. Suddenly I was filled with cold dread, clammy uneasiness for the circumstances and decisions that had brought me hear. I saw myself eating sushi on the trendy edges of Vancouver’s Kitsilano Beach, swimming in a sheltered alcove of Maine’s vacationland coastline, asleep under the watchful, snowy eaves of my families Vermont ski house, Max’s strong curves aside me. My selfish introspection was broken by the emergence of a prisoner, cautious, haggard, beautiful in the waning moonlight, across the threshold of the brick portal.
The man closed the door softly, knowledgably, and turned to address us, eyes ablaze with indignant compassion. He was 60 years old, if I had to guess, and he stooped with the weight of his sins, however real they were, in addition to sporting facial hair that would have made Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky proud. Fyodor scanned the perimeter of the alcove instinctively, and produced a small bundle from his coat, which he handed to the prisoner. He quickly devoured the contents, several elaborate looking sandwiches and a small flask of some vitreous, milky liquor, which he downed in a single gulp of gratitude. Seemingly revived of his deathly stupor, words began to flow like floodwaters from a broken dam. Irina rushed to translate the gist of it to me as the group huddled close around him, insulating his experiences from the cold judgment of the night. He recounted several apparently recent horrors, which Irina struggled to explain to me, caught in the same viral transfixion as the rest of them. This story was followed by a few minutes of self-conscious wheezing, which we tried to ignore, his breathlessness at having made it out alive wracking his worn body. It was only then I noticed two things. The first were his fingertips, reduced to a collection of pulpy, bloody stubs, the nails seemingly grazed off and sealed with awful black dirt. The second were his watery, vaguely rheumy eyes, which I was fairly certain belonged to a distant improbability named Msgr. Peder Zherov.
‘Peder?..’ I inquired hesitantly, and soon our group parted in genuine awe as we embraced emotionally, near strangers now near brethren in this strange turn of fate. ‘I knew it! I knew it… vhen I say some are bound to zee same course and inevitable intersection, zhey dismiss me as zome nihilistic fool!’, Peder shouted into the night, and Irina rushed to calm him, the barbed wire-shrouded guard towers casting nightmarish shadows across the alcove. ‘I have heard about Max’, he continued in a more reserved voice. ‘You don’t need to tell me anyzhing. You know, vee spoke shortly before you left him in Haugesund. ‘I don’t zhink he ever cast another in zee same light he saved for you’, he said, smiling sadly. ‘vhen it happen, I vas in the airport here in Leningrad, my flight for Paris left in 30 minutes. Zhey brought in zee dogs and everytzing. I have never been so docile yet furious in my life.’ Clark nodded gravely, his eyes cast downward at Peder’s pained honesty.
Seeing me resting my eyes uneasily on his stubby fingers, he continued. ‘You know, as small child in Zhetanyeska, to vhich industrial holocaust of Norilsk look like storybook, I vitnessed a fox in a trap gnaw off its own leg. I was 8 and returning home from vhat passed for school in zhose times. I had intended to keep going, my mother had made vonderful soup for me that I knew was beyond our modest means, and I had been anticipating it all day. I couldn’t turn away though; zee fox look at me with such determination, zuch angry purpose, that I felt compelled to see zee awful deed through. When it had finally escaped, it licked zee fur of eetz now detached and lifeless leg for a second before limping off; zome kind of sad compulsion. I never truly understood that until I spent two montz gnawing at my own fingertips with cheap spoon, the tunnel to zhis portal becoming zee confines of my vorld.’ At the conclusion of his story, he wept softly, a few deep sobs interspersed with sickly coughing passing through him before he stood silently again, his wide eyes on us. Fyodor was distracted though, his compassion mixed with fearful anticipation. He scanned the horizon with a small brass monocle he had produced from his coat pocket, beckoning us to follow him silently. We formed a long, sinuous queue, each lost in our own heightened awareness of the dangers ahead.
We managed to escape Kresty without incident, however, and I gathered the nerve to ask Fyodor how he knew my lost acquaintance. ‘He was a friend of my father’s in the village I grew up in’, he answered in a tone that seemed painfully casual, obviously aware of the glaring question of how they managed to ‘choose’ which prisoners would receive their aid. They did what they could though, that much was obvious, and I held them in the silent high regard I reserved for those made of action and not just hollow rhetoric. By the time we reached the safe house it was 5 am and the sun threatened to reappear over the gray eaves of the Boulevard Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, its narrow passages brooding and uncertain of a new day. I bid farewell to them, making an unspectacular and surprisingly clear-headed return to the hotel, the steel tubes of the metro now partially my own, I felt. I sighed with sharp relief once the door of my room was closed. Blinds drawn against the assault of the rising sun, I settled into heavy, cloudless sleep. I was to meet Fyodor and Peder at the safe house again at 7 that evening, to drink, eat, and formulate a path out of Leningrad for Peder and myself. Fyodor had insisted that he himself was tied to this place like a barnacle on a rock, so there would be no ‘leaving’ or ‘escape’ for him.
I slept with unequivocal purpose, my body having passed through the plush confines of the mattress and into the ceiling of the floor below, the leaded crystal of the overhead chandelier transformed into fabulous gems, bright aquamarines and heliodors of the mythic Siberian interior. I dreamt I was an accumulator of this sparkling wealth, a dogged hunter of the bright colors and physical heft these crystals offered, my visions perhaps just a subconscious nod to Max’s fantastic story of Arizona; the white desert and long, empty roads. When I awoke, darkness had descended on the city once again, and I felt uncertain as to whether the past day was even real, perhaps it was yesterday and I’d just spliced a past memory into the here and now.
Irina was next to me; I’d barely remembered her insistence on walking me home the previous morning, the way I’d felt invincible arms in arm across the steely gray dawn of the city. I wanted to tell her about Max, that I was in a strange headspace, but I thought better of it, and kissed her neck the way a naïve teenager might, hesitant yet insistent. ‘You’re a good man Clark, don’t lose that’, she breathed into my ear warmly. I didn’t know what to say so I held her a little tighter, and exhaled deeply, feeling her strong, worn hands across my stomach. She told me she’d been on the Soviet national rock climbing team and done some big peaks in the Pamir’s last year, and I believed every word. When we made love it had a strange finality about it, like a door closing in the middle of winter. Part of me wanted to just stay in that bed with her forever, but instead I ordered coffee and some starchy Teutonic breakfast, which we devoured between laughter and prodding.
The trip back to the safe house now almost carried the ease of routine, and I stood aside Irina in the crowded subway car with proudly indifferent posturing. My eyes met those of my fellow travelers with direct inquisitiveness, as if to say, ‘this city might be my own’, if only by virtue of being near her. The air was cold, certainly below freezing, and a bright layer of silvery frost shone on the stylized edges of passing buildings as I walked up the wide boulevard; a promise of beauty that the state couldn’t censor.
‘Zo, I have daughter in Vancouver’, Peder began, after Irina’s friend, the demure blond from the previous evening, had served us all generous cocktails. She seemed to relish our wary inspection of the viscous red liquid, which tasted like the mirages he’d seen off the Cote D’Azure some 6 months ago. ‘How much money do you have now?’, Peder asked me without embarrassment. ‘Around $8,000 USD, I believe’, I replied nervously. ‘Ok, so ziss eez not issue zhen’, he chuckled, his warm disposition and odd inflections having been revived after the previous night’s ordeal, it seemed. ‘Vhat I am proposing, you are probably vondering, is zhat vee go to Vancouver. Zee boat is gone… you did zee right zhing’, he continued in haphazard wisdom, quelling my growing indignation at having my future outlined with a broad sweep of Peder’s claw-like hands. ‘Yez, tventy-five years ago I marry Canadian woman… Caroline, she vas beautiful, she eez beautiful, so kind, so full of sort of life people are always looking for in wrong places…’ he trailed off, lost in thought. ‘Is your family there?’, Irina asked. ‘Vee have one daughter, Angelina. She probably 23, 24 now?’ His eyes bulged beyond their usual nervous rheumy condition, and warm tears flowed down the edges of his pockmarked face. Fyodor put down his cigarette and put his arm around Peder as he blubbered without reservation for several minutes, the rest of the group carrying on in their own conversations, too familiar with unfairness to feel self conscious, it seemed.
‘Right now, I have nothing’, he stated flatly to us, his fingers bandaged into little white sausages, their inflammation easing slowly beneath layers of gauze and antiseptic. ‘Vhen I arrive back in Leningrad vith zee gold, vhey take me to special detention facility outside city, one hour ride and no idea vhere I going… zee city slowly fading behind trees, poor people who work in urban factories but forced to live out here passing me like cattle…’ his voice was strained, cracking under the ghostly memories. ‘Never have I been so scared in my life.’ ‘You delivered what they wanted, why would they fuck with you?’, I asked furiously- to go after a kind, modest man who had already sold his soul to some hollow arm of the state seemed particularly cruel. ‘Somezing about it being impure, I pay too much, I forget… vhatever it vas, I knew it vas bullshit, you know? But, I zhink of my flat in Leningrad, sitting empty so much time, all the illegal books and letters there, plans on how to overthrow state, correspondence with French and Spanish democracy groups’, he shook his head with proud bewilderment. ‘I vhas so naïve, but, I guess it inevitable I pay price, Kremlin have so many eyes, especially on men like me.’
‘Do you know where my father is?’, Fyodor asked suddenly, having been silently pacing the living room while we conversed, lost in his own turmoil. Peder’s face brightened unexpectedly, But I was certain that the news was bad that I thought he might hallucinating under the stress, but I was soon proven wrong. ‘You know, amidst all zhiss bad news, I am so happy to deliver one piece ov fairness. Eugeny is alive and well, last we talk, he move Katya and himself to Rome, barely made it out of the country, he tell me… plane vhas leaving and KGB try and stop it on runway, turn it around, Italian pilot furious and tell them zhey intefere vith safety and it have to wait.’ I wanted to be stunned, to be moved by the unfolding network of human compassion and ruthlessness, but really I’d become sufficiently numb at this point that everything was par for the course. ‘Yes, I will go to Vancouver’, I answered finally, and Fyodor shot me a glance of jealous approval, the rest of the group already discussing their next ‘justice heist’, as they referred to their illegal late-night adventures. Unbeknownst to anyone but myself, I had few close mementos I carried with me at almost all times- personal artifacts like photographs and men’s jewelry that had come through my family, along with a few crystals I was particularly fond of.
One of these was in the pocket of my overcoat, and it dug pleasantly into my side. Sometimes I felt its force a protection from a hostile world. I brought it out and held it so that a small nest of greenish-yellow light emanated from its heart, the inverse reflection of the weak sunlight from the large windows across the room. Peder saw it and was silent for a moment then said smiling ‘Murzinka, no? Very good clarity for location. Vhere you get zis?’ I had not known Peder’s knowledge extended beyond precious metals and into gems, but I should have assumed as much. In my hands I held a perfect Heliodor crystal, fifteen centimeter long and perhaps 3 thick; it rose in hexagonal perfection to a smooth, flat termination, and contained perhaps two hundred carats of superb cutting material. I handed it to Fyodor, who inspected it with genuine interest before returning it to my hand. I motioned it was his to keep. ‘You have done so much for me in this brief time, fate or otherwise, I feel that I must begin to part with the possessions I’ve idolized, and this is from near your hometown, is it not?’ ‘Yes…’ Fyodor began, faltering with skepticism of this sudden gift.
‘Yes, I do not know much about gems, but I have of course heard of the famous gem fields of Murzinka, I grew up in Ekaterinburgskaya, quite close’, he continued. ‘As I child, I remember my father returning home with a beautiful crystal of aquamarine, or perhaps topaz, from one of the miners there. He had received his paycheck that day and spent more than half of it on the gem. My mother was furious and began to beat his mercilessly with a wooden paddle, but he just laughed and brushed her off, saying that ‘even poor people deserve to have a little beauty in their lives.’ He paused before continuing, the silent weight of his words and our collective experience on all of us.
‘Than….Thank you’, he said at length. ‘I have never wavered in my belief that there is no god, but sometimes I wonder if the order of the universe is less run by coincidence than we think. I would like to hold onto this, and I will… I know how much it is worth, even with today’s apathy for beauty, and would only sell it in desperation.’ ‘Good’, I added, ‘Let it bring you the same contentment in times of struggle as it has brought me.’ We shook hands amicably, and I bid farewell to the rest of the group, Peder and myself circling the room and exchanging warm words and an embrace with each of them before closing the secret little white door firmly behind them and exiting through the narrow stone corridor to the street above. Irina looked so sad, the icy silvers I’d seen in her eyes when we first met. ‘You’re a good man, don’t ever lose that.’ Even if I wasn’t, just to be spoken to, to be trusted with the safety of a stranger that way wasn’t something easily forgotten. ‘So you rather surprise I know zo much about gem and mineral, eh?’ Peder said in the infectious tone I recalled from our meeting in Haugesund, and I told him he was indeed surprised, but I had always believed interesting people were interesting in many regards, just as dull people were often uniformly boring. The morning was building, the wave of human life in the city cresting all around us. ‘Let me tell you little more of my story…’, he began, and we settled into the familiar rhythm of conversation as we made our way to the metro station and back to my hotel to scheme something out of nothing for what might be either the first or the last time. I couldn’t decide whether the sun was rising or setting, if I was in the near east or the far west, if I was Max’s lost someone, Irina’s good man; my own private greatness.
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