By the spring, they would be living together in a room of their own—a mighty eleven square meters, which, at the tail end of those still-emancipated times, could occasionally be allotted to a couple living in an unregistered “revolutionary marriage.”
A photo of Florence and Leon remains from this period, preserved only because it was sent by Florence to her family in America. Taken on a trip to Crimea—the closest the two came to a honeymoon—it shows them on a pebbly beach, with two other couples. The men kneel in the sand; the women, in bathing costumes, sit perched and laughing on their men’s backs, styling their poses after the “sports photography” so popular at that time. Florence, pale in her dark bathing suit, sits on Leon’s wiry, sun-blackened shoulders. He stares at the camera, a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, his eye squinting suspiciously against the sun. On the reverse of the photograph, only the words “Yalta ’35.”
—
EVERY YEAR FOR THE next three years, Leon Brink asked Florence Fein to marry him officially, and each time she answered, half jokingly, “You surprise me, Leon Naumovich. I didn’t think you went in for that kind of petit-bourgeois philistinism.” She did not know what stood behind her reluctance. Perhaps a corner of her heart could not yet accept that the “permanent” part of her life—the marrying and settling down and bearing children—would happen under the crimson-and-yellow flag. And yet, dancing in the buoyant infant hours of the new year, she could not have known that the strand which began to unspool with Kirov’s assassination would eventually thread through their lives too. And that her decision to marry Leon would not in the end be separated from a long chain of events begun the day the charismatic Leningrad Party secretary was rewarded for his loyalty with a bullet.
The old Metropol, it seems, is still open for business. Unlike numberless other establishments in Moscow, it never closed its doors. In fact, in all the years I lived in the city, the hotel remained largely unchanged. Now it’s restored in all its Art Nouveau detail—the fairytale mosaics, the plaster friezes, the ornate Deco balconies gleaming in tsarist splendor. The cars parked out front when we arrive are BMWs. Inside, frowning, bald-pated bachelors stand around the jewelry boutique with pouting blondes. “Just like Hollywood,” Tom, my boss, observes as we walk past them.
“But with fewer communists,” I amend.
Our compatriots from L-Pet are already gathered at a table in the imperial dining room. It is a custom of bilateral dinners such as ours that the first three shots go down smoothly and merrily, and that the repertoire of opening toasts follows a set script: First, to the success of our joint endeavor. Second, to the health of Faraz Abuskalayev, L-Pet’s CEO. And, finally, za nas, za vas, za neft i gaz!
The libations for this trifecta are poured not from common, lowbrow bottles, but from two civilized crystal carafes set by our waiter at opposite foci of our ovoid banquet table.
Some brief introductions are in order, starting with the honored guest to my right: Ivan Kablukov (“the Boot,” as Tom and I lovingly refer to him). Kablukov’s official job title at L-Pet is “vice-president of corporate security and communication,” though what he actually does there is anyone’s guess. He has about fifty kilograms on me and looks ten years my senior, but he claims to have been born in ’47, making him four years younger. If this is the case, he was apparently never much of a student, since he didn’t manage to graduate from the Gubkin State University of Oil and Gas until 1992. In fact, I’ve never been able to reliably ascertain how the Boot passed the first forty-five years of his life. Given his security post I assume he was connected with the law. Which side of the law I can’t say. I can say that Kablukov knows not a goddamn thing about either oil or ships. The last time he and I met, in Helsinki, where I was testing our tankers’ new propulsion system at the Aker ice pools, he sat beside me through our discussion with the Finnish engineers in assassinlike silence, wearing his Ray-Bans like he was at a poker tournament. Every once in a while he’d turn to me and say, “Na khera nam vsyo eto nujno?” “The fuck we need to know all this for?”
And, like the helpful boy I am, I was set and ready to explain to him what the fuck we needed to know it all for, except he disappeared mid-meeting. I didn’t see him again until dinner, where he showed up with some devitsa two meters tall. A blonde in boots, spilling out of her silver-fox stole. Guffawing like a horse the whole meal. You would have thought he brought her along to show her off, but throughout our three-day trip Kablukov did nothing but complain to me about her. “I have to take this padlo shopping again. This heifer won’t leave me alone until I buy her two suitcases of fur in Helsinki. Like we don’t have our own fur in Russia! Where the hell does she think the Finns get theirs?”
We got to know each other a little more intimately the last evening, in the sauna, over chicken cutlets and eighty-proof Finnish Koskenkorva. “It’s softer,” he tells me. And that’s when I notice that our VP of security is a patron of the arts—covered neck to belly in ink. And not those “Never forget mother” tattoos, either, but ones that indicate membership in certain exclusive societies the likes of which simple men like me are better off not knowing about. For two steamy hours I had little else to look at but 118 kilos of tattooed flesh wrapped in a bedsheet. The Boot must have made the same toast twelve times: “Time spent with friends does not get added to one’s life span!”
Now that Kablukov and I have done the ritual flogging of each other with birch twigs, he treats me as affectionately as a brother. “How have you been, friend?” he says now at the banquet table, and pours a neat thirty grams into my shot glass. Right up to the top.
“Very fine, Ivan Matveyevich. And you?”
He sighs. “I’d be better off if those two weren’t buzzing in my ear.”