WITHOUT QUITE BEING AWARE of it, I was remembering my father—his thin frame, his ropy muscles, the hair on his toes—as we made our way up the tiled stairs to the Sanduny banya’s second floor. At my eye level was his flapping penis. Already I was aware of its being different from my own—not only in size, but in the prominence of the polished bulb of the tip. It would be another ten years before I would learn about the mark of Abraham that I and the rest of my Jewish peers were missing—sons born after the war, who, for fear of the fascists, had entered manhood with our foreskins intact.
The Sanduny banya was older and hotter than the municipal facilities I’d gone to with Mama, those plain and dingy public baths that lacked the atmosphere of departed imperial glory which lingered everywhere amid Sanduny’s carved and gilded walls, its peeling moldings, the chipped marble staircases and vast clouded mirrors. A ruined paradise, a shipwreck of ghosts flogging themselves and one another like penitents. Upstairs, where the steam was densest, the real enthusiasts congregated in their peaked felt hats and slippers. There the air was barely breathable. From somewhere, Papa obtained a big zinc tub and filled it with cold water from a spigot.
“What’s that for?”
“You’ll see.”
Naked, he carried it to the wooden benches at the rear while I followed behind, afraid of losing him in the forest of legs. The floor under my feet was covered in slippery leaves.
“Now, when it gets too hot for you, you just bend down and inhale the air right up above this tub, see? The moment you feel your lungs burning, put your face right by this cold water and breathe. You got it, boss?”
“Got it.”
I did as he instructed, while he scraped his back and shoulders with a scrubber. Every time someone opened the oven door and tossed more water on the glowing bricks, I dipped my head down to the zinc tub. As soon as I was able to breathe again I’d look around furtively at the other boys in the baths. Some were just a little older than I was, and a few were younger. All of them strutted beside their fathers, confidently withstanding the heat. I felt myself growing jealous of them, embarrassed every time I needed to kneel down and drink in the cool air above the tub. The boy who had gone to the banya each week with Mama—surrounded there by white-skinned, milky creatures, mountains of old flesh and mounds of ripe bellies, patronized by kindly female smiles—seemed to me now a distant person, a little child. My mother was always reminding me to clean this spot and that, “so nothing gets stuck between.” Papa, handing me the soap, seemed to trust me to take care of this business on my own.
I tried not to linger above the tank of icy water, where it was easier to stay. Each time I stood up, I tried to hold out against the heat a little longer. The floor scalded my feet. Somewhere in the haze above me, the men were calling for the attendant to “Toss on more!” I could hear the creak of the boiler door, the water being hurled against the bricks and exploding in hissing steam, filling the room with fog as I struggled to breathe.
—
KABLUKOV’S VOICE WHIPPED ME back into the present.
“I couldn’t fail to notice you put our boys from Sausen through their paces at their presentation.”
Our side of the steam room had emptied out, and the vapor had subsided. I saw Tom get out of his cold shower and wrap himself in a towel. Scrubbed and refreshed, he sat down beside me. “What’s the man saying?”
“That we ask a lot of questions.”
“Tell him we asked them the same questions we would ask any potential contractor.”
But Kablukov seemed to understand without translation. “And it’s right well that you did! I told those boys they should know this shipping is a serious business. When they start this job, they have to be prepared for everything.”
It took some self-control for me not to raise my eyebrow. I turned and translated for Tom.
“We haven’t made our decision yet, Mr. Kablukov,” he said respectfully. “There are still a few other contractors to consider.”
Kablukov shut one eye and nodded gravely to show he understood without need of an interpreter, and to signal, it seemed, that he had no intention of meddling in our selection process. “It’s your consideration that we’re depending on.” He set his elbows firmly on his toweled thighs, leaning in and lowering his voice to a throaty whisper. “I didn’t set up our meeting for no good reason.”
I did my best to convey the gist of this, though I wasn’t sure where it was heading.
“Our Sausen friends, whether you give the contract to them or to somebody else”—Kablukov shrugged his narrow shoulders—“over the long run, it won’t make a big difference.”
So why all the fuss? I thought.
“That is not the reason I wanted us to talk like this—person to person. I did not wish to make it an official meeting, because what I have to say is still very early news. In six months, L-Pet will make an announcement that it is putting up for auction twelve percent of L-Pet stock, with an option to buy another three percent.”
He motioned with his fleshy arm for me to translate for Tom, and sat back patiently as I did.
I watched Tom perk up out of his vaporous stupor. “Ask him if they’ll be selling those shares on the open market.”
Once more Kablukov seemed to understand the question without my help, and answered: “Who becomes a successful bidder in this auction will depend on many things. We expect Exxon and Chevron will try to offer us bags of lucre for our reserves. But we have no desire to tie ourselves up with a behemoth. As Mr. Khodorkovsky discovered, the bigger your partners, the bigger your problems. What matters to us is what’s in here.” He jerked his thumb toward the hairy flesh straining to hold in his gut. “We like doing business with people who like doing business with us. You understand?”
Through the fog and chiming anxiety in my own head, I understood that Kablukov was attempting to do me a favor: he was smoothing the road for Tom.
“We have preferred buyers,” Kablukov continued. “Just as we have preferred partners.”
I had expected a stick, but instead he was dangling a carrot. I did not believe him. I did not trust him. But I saw no way around all that flesh. Kablukov nodded at me and reclined politely. He was handing me the script.
I translated obediently. What else was there to do? I could taste the sourness of my expression. Four years of work, the gem of my life’s labor—surrendered to the gluttony of a sweating, geriatric gangster. But studying my reaction Kablukov only smiled. He seemed to read my smirk as a show of our alliance. “Does our friend over here understand what I’ve just shared with you?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Tom said, leaning toward Kablukov’s bench. “You’re talking about Continental becoming the preferred buyer of twelve percent of L-Pet stock?”
His eyelids still at half-mast, Kablukov nodded.
“With an option to buy another three.”
“In two or three years, you could raise that share to twenty percent,” Kablukov suggested to me.
When I translated for Tom, he said, in astonishment, “That’s a fifth of the company! It would make us a strategic equity investor.”