—
I CARRIED THE BAG while Valya played the role of tour guide. We were walking down a seventeenth-century road, she said. Peter the Great had given all this land to the Demidov family in reward for manufacturing his army’s weapons. Valya pointed off to the right, where one of the dilapidated Demidov mansions still stood, its Arcadian grandeur reduced to a redbrick crumble. Wild growth had reclaimed the rows of classical columns. Slender maples and a riot of saplings sprouted from the roofs of the ancient serfs’ barracks. Rain-soaked pornography and green beer bottles littered our path through the woods. “Supposedly, this is all being preserved as a national landmark, but, as you can see, our mentality…” Valya nodded at the trash. Farther down the road, we met the “monstrosities” she’d warned me about, new mansions whose enviable views of the forest were blocked by the enormous security walls erected to guard them. I could see only the upper stories of these novostroiki, no different from the typical American McMansion except for one detail: they had what looked like garage doors cut into the brick. It took me a startled moment to realize that these were security gates, rolled down over enormous windows.
“It’s thieves who are most afraid of other thieves,” Valya expounded. “We call these Houses for the Poor. Homeless Shelters. You should be here on a Sunday morning after one of their parties. They stand around, hung over, glancing at everyone who passes like a dog they want to kick. Like ‘Kto ty takoy? Who the hell are you to look at me?’ They’ve got that look like in our army: ‘We’ll punish you.’?”
“No less punishing than the Party bosses of the old days.”
“Oh sure, now everyone lambastes ‘the Party.’ What was the ‘Party’? It was thousands of people. Millions of people in the Party. If you wanted to do something, be an activist, improve things, you could find channels through the Party. Now a handful of old KGB-ists run everything. Vladimir Vladimirovich and his judo partners have everyone in a chokehold.”
We walked onward with our loads. On our left were the novostroiki with their mounted security cameras, and on our right, the old log dachas—faded yellow, peeling green, guarded by yapping, mangy dogs. To our left, paranoid New Russia; to our right the decomposing Soviet Union.
“In 1948, Stalin gave all this land to the army general staff,” Valya informed me. “After they’d won the war for him. The generals each got a full hectare. The division commanders got a half-hectare, and so on down the line. Fifteen years ago the developers started buying the big plots and doing four-part splits. If we’d held out, we would have gotten even more for our land. But what we got was enough to buy my house. This friend we’re going to see—her family divided the land up long ago among themselves and sold it, but she’s the last holdout. Oh, she’s gotten offers, of course. But she refuses—only because she’s got nowhere else to go, poor soul. I’m surprised no one has set her house on fire yet. Don’t look shocked. That’s the way ours do it around here. When they rip up the old fencing and put up their horrible walls, they toss the wire and pickets right into her yard. You’ll see for yourself.”
—
“YOO-HOO! INNA IVANOVNA!” VALYA called when we arrived. She let herself in through the open door while I waited on the front steps and observed the sad sight of the yard. Splintered wood and wire lay about as if after a tornado. Mold-rotted bricks protruded from the foundation like teeth from decayed gums. A bathtub with broken feet collected rainwater beside a rusted old kanistra of the sort once used to store gasoline. Aside from a meager vegetable garden and some gnarled apple trees, the yard was overrun with weeds.
Descending the steps, Inna Ivanovna finally emerged: a tiny babushka with shorn hair, and hands as arthritic as her apple trees. She wore a ratty gray sweater, sweatpants, and felt slippers.
“Inna Ivanovna, I hope you don’t mind us stopping by like this—we were just passing through. This is my friend Yuliy Leontevich. He’s come here all the way from America.”
“Please, come in—just step over that,” Inna Ivanovna said, motioning to the piles of cotton insulation littering the floor. She seemed not to care whether I was from America or the moon.
“Some mushrooms for you, from our forest, and berries to make a compote,” said Valya, then set out everything, including the cheese, pickles, and vegetables, on the old woman’s rickety kitchen table.
“Oh, Valya. You didn’t need to.”
“We’re leaving Sunday, and all this is just going to spoil during the week,” she said, though anyone could see the food was fresh from the store.
“Come, come; please, don’t mind this mess.” The old elfin creature kicked another pile of insulation from the door. “My son brought this over so I could winterize that side of the house. It gets so cold.”
Did she really spend the winter in this place? I did not want to believe it. I could not explain how a house like this could remain standing, let alone stay warm. Its walls were water-damaged, its plywood partitions warped. Above the kitchen table hung a round cardboard frame lamp of a sort I had not seen in four decades. The cloth stretched over it like a pair of old bloomers. The wiring that fed it was ancient ceramic-coated circuitry, pinned with staples to the walls because inside the walls the wires would surely catch fire. Inna Ivanovna sat watching Valya put the food into a knee-high refrigerator, her back pressed against an ancient wood-fired wall oven. Was it possible she still used it? Above a low cupboard, like an icon, hung a portrait of young Pushkin.
“How long are you staying in our posyolok?” Inna Ivanovna inquired kindly.
Valya answered for me. “Yulik is flying back to America next week. He lives there. He’s Lenny’s father.”
“Who?”
“Lenny. Katya’s young man.”
“Katusha is a sweet girl,” the old woman said, smiling at me.
“Yes,” I averred.
—
“HOW CAN THAT WOMAN’S CHILDREN let her live in that death trap?” I asked on our way home.
“Her son lives in her apartment in Moscow. He’s a nihilist. That’s my diagnosis.” Valya snapped her thumb and forefinger against her throat in the sign for a drinker. “Owes everyone money. Makes just enough for a smoke and a bottle.”
“I guess even being the grandson of a division commander can’t rescue someone from that fate.”
“No, it can’t. Look at our Alyosha! Didn’t lack for anything growing up. Piano lessons, tutors. Ninochka was flying all over the world with her delegations, but there were four grandparents, and just one little miracle between them.”