The intensity of his suffering as he listened seemed to turn his black eyes blue, to make them glow like diamonds. He would know now how she’d tried to flee from him. He would recognize at last what kind of whore he’d bound his fate with. On the abortionist’s bed, Florence had believed she would die. She had begged Providence to give her another chance among the living. But the world was mechanistic, and now she prepared herself to pay the price. Leon continued to clutch the sheet. Now he buried his face in it, as if to inhale the redolence of its carnage.
But she was wrong about him. When he lifted his eyes again, they were dry. “Florence, listen to me carefully.” He squeezed her hand. “Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place.”
Pines and roadside shrubs and the steel latticework of rural stations streaked by my window on the eastbound train to Alabino. During my hour’s commute I’d resolved to come clean to Lenny about my indiscretions with Kablukov. It was for the best. My humbling confession might succeed where other inducements had failed. And yet, when I spotted Lenny in his striped T-shirt, innocently waving his hand from the driver’s window of a rusted Lada, I lost all my prepared speeches. The morning seemed too fresh, his smile too genuine to spoil so quickly. Lenny came out to help me with my bag; he looked surprised that I’d actually come. “Get ready to meet the freak parade,” he happily warned me as we pulled out onto the empty town road. “There’s Alyosha Alcoholic, and Zhorik the Georgian Lothario. One is Aunt Valya’s nephew, the other’s her husband. They’re the same age.”
“Are those their formal titles?”
“Zhorik’s official title is ‘invalid.’ Don’t ask me how Valya arranged that. Forty-four years old, and he already collects a monthly pension. His informal title is ‘househusband.’ We’re just over down this way.”
The house we pulled up to was not the patched-up shack I would have imagined from Lenny’s car and dress, but a neat three-story clapboard, with a new coat of cinnamon-colored paint. We entered through the back of the wraparound veranda into the kitchen, where we encountered a towheaded and unshaven young man in rubber slippers. A bony chest was exposed through a mostly unbuttoned shirt. “Alexei, meet my father, Yuliy Leontevich,” Lenny said by way of introduction.
Alexei nodded formally. “A little eye-opener for our American guest?” A bottle of Russian Standard stood half empty on the kitchen table.
“Thank you,” I told him. “I prefer to start my mornings with cognac.”
“Cognac it is.” Alexei found a fresh bottle in the cupboard and opened it for me. “The girls have gone mushrooming in the woods, and Zhorik is out getting the meat for our shashlik. Enjoy the quiet while you can.”
I adjusted myself to his definition of “quiet.” On the counter, a miniature radio was tuned at top volume to a news program. We listened to the righteous-voiced female radio host denouncing the continued imprisonment of another Yukos oil executive rumored to have been denied medical treatments until he signed a confession.
“What station is this?” I asked.
“Ekho Moskvy. The one our gracious president allows us to operate so we can claim to the world that we have a free press.”
“Alyosha never turns the radio off,” said Lenny.
“You ought to know all about this,” said Alyosha. “Aren’t you an oilman?”
“I see only the engineering side,” I said. “What line of work are you in, Alexei?”
“Work? I don’t work. I’m a freeloader. My occupation is sitting on my mother’s neck.”
“Well, that’s work too.”
“He’s being modest,” Lenny informed me. “Alyosha is a bona-fide money launderer. Just last week, the local police came and raided his office.”
“Those crooks overstepped their bounds,” the skinny man muttered. “They took five hundred thousand rubles, so I had to call the precinct militzia—my guy there. He sorted it out with a phone call. Ten thousand I might have let pass, but the pigs got greedy.”
“So unofficially you’re an entrepreneur, and officially you’re a derelict,” I said.
“I’m a nonperson,” Alyosha proclaimed proudly. “They have no record of me. I’m not written in anywhere.”
“Is that legal?”
“Having no legitimate employment is no longer a crime. All they can do to me is deny me a pension. And I don’t need their stinking five hundred rubles a month.”
“And, naturally, you don’t vote,” said Lenny, smiling at me as he needled Alyosha with the reliable bait.
“Voting is a profanation,” Alexei replied on cue. “The voters—what are they? There to play the role of the audience who claps.”
“Ask him who his hero is,” Lenny said, then answered his own question. “Ralph Ellison.”
“The Invisible Man is a cipher,” Alyosha resumed madly. “He lives in a basement full of lightbulbs, siphoning off electricity from the monopolized energy company. The utility company is unaware of his existence, as is the fraudulent state whose authority he does not recognize. Like the invisible Negro, I choose to have no existence in the eyes of our illegitimate state.”
“Show him how you did it, Alyosha.”
Alyosha walked to the plug socket above the sink. “It’s very easy. You ought to know this as an engineer—you run half the current through a wire attached to a piece of sheet metal, and ground it by sticking it in the earth. I stuck it out there—see?—in the vegetable garden. The electricity runs all year round, without adding a single watt to Valya’s meter.”
It seemed that, on top of his gifts of oratory and barter, Alyosha had the Russian alcoholic’s talent for fixing anything with his hands. “With the heat it’s even easier. I just go out into the yard in the winter and pour a kettle of boiling water over the heat meter, and the thing freezes right up. You can heat all three stories of the house without paying a kopek.” His voice resounded with pride. “In Russia, we are all thieves,” he now declared in English, and then, a few decibels louder than before: “They steal from us big! I steal back little!”
“So pleased with himself—the great philosopher.” A voice sounded from the hall. A plump bottle-redhead of about sixty entered the kitchen, carrying a large zinc bucket of mushrooms with a curved blade laid on top. She wore sandals and a pair of shorts over heroic thighs that might have belonged to some mythological kolhoznitsa gathering sheaves of grain in a Soviet mural. This had to be Valentina, the famous Aunt Valya, Katya’s mother’s cousin. Behind her trotted Katya, in tight jeans and rubber galoshes.
“So you’ve met our resident Socrates,” Valentina said, spreading a newspaper on the table and dumping out the contents of her and Katya’s buckets. She began rapidly sorting the fungi on the newspaper, rejecting the very bad or very dirty ones and tossing them back in the bucket.
“Did you find some good ones?” I inquired.
“A few chernushki, and all those little foxes.”
“We would’ve gotten more, but now everyone’s discovered our sweet spot,” said Katya with her gentle, orthodontal lisp.
“That one’s a toadstool,” Alyosha pointed out.
“It’s a ryzhik. You don’t know anything.”
“Can’t you see the thin stem? It’s inedible. You’ll poison us all, woman.”
“Look who’s talking! I didn’t see you out this morning, poking from glade to glade, bending, picking.”