Morgan Stone - The Russian Factor

“What a poor woman. Why did that man treat her like that?” Since learning about business, post-Soviet style, Anna had developed a morbid interest in the goings-on below the windows.

“If she had an attaché case stuffed with cash it might have worked out for her.” I pulled the Leicaflex off its tripod and rewound the film. The day’s business had pretty much wrapped up. Galina had already come and gone. The woman with the flowers was sitting on the granite steps, head in her hands. Two Prokuratura guards stood by the doors ignoring her.

“She is leaving. Jess, we must interview her for your story!” Anna headed for the vestibule.

“No, no, no. You can’t run out there. Are you joking?”

Anna obviously wasn’t. “You want a story or not? There is a story, right there! What kind of journalist are you? Watching and waiting and lurking and taking notes, taking pictures. Maybe you could write of her and make a difference.”

“Maybe I could get her killed. She gets press and they won’t like that.”

“What they ? Who is they ?”

We watched the woman walk away leaving the flowers on the steps, a guard kicked them onto the icy road. “Those are they. ” I gestured with my thumb.

Anna surprised me with a hug. Arms around me, she whispered. “I do not know if I want to know about this business. I know, but I do not want to know.”

It was confusing. Was she telling me she didn’t want to know about her own family’s involvement in the kind of business we’d seen below the windows? It was time for an immediate diversion. “Hey, we need to go downtown and it’s high time to get out of this stuffy apartment. There’s a store on Khreshchatyk with some absolutely beautiful Ukrainian folk art. I want to get some things for the folks back home. Maybe we’ll find something for us too.”

“For us?” Anna asked.

Good point. “Sure, for the apartment. Something to liven up this dreary place.” I backpedaled, analyzing my unconscious assertion.

Underground and heading north, Anna talked enthusiastically about how great it was to take a subway downtown or wherever she wanted with whomever she wanted. She carried on about how she envied my free western lifestyle. I listened with half an ear, enjoying the alien sights and sounds of the subway. She had no idea that, at times, what I most wanted was to escape from the very culture and lifestyle she idolized.

We emerged from the subway on Khreshchatyk Street. I was vaguely aware that Anna had become sullen and quiet. Her demeanor really caught my attention when, walking along yakking about something or other, it struck me, I was talking to myself. Anna was a hundred feet behind, sulking by the stylized green M that marks the subway entrance.

I headed back, a little embarrassed. “What happened? Let’s go. The shop is straight ahead.”

She stared a million miles down Khreshchatyk. Her shoulders slumped.

“Oh Anna, what’s wrong?” I reached out to take her arm.

Nothing for a second or two, then, “I want to have this too.”

“What?” I asked, looking around.

“You would not understand. You are a foreigner.”

“Try me. What is it you want?”

“All of this.” She waved her mitten encased hands around. “At home I can never be as free as this. I cannot have a life of my own…” She stopped. “No, you will not understand.”

“I might, I’m smarter than I look.”

“I do not want to go back home, Jess. How can I explain all this to you in a few words? You see, if I go back, I’m finished. I’ll return to my damned preplanned life. I will live as they tell me and I don’t want it! I will have to date Misha again and a few months later they will marry me off.”

“You mean they are forcing you into an arranged marriage?”

“You can say that. My mother is crazy about him and can’t wait till we’ll be married. It is vitally important to her. I am old. You know, I am 27 now. And it’s not just him, it’s everything. I am not allowed to do anything without mother’s permission.”

“But Anna, you are an adult. Nobody can tell you who you have to marry, or what to do with your life. You can do what you want, what’s best for you.”

“Oh no, no! I can do what I want here … now… in Ukraine. That’s exactly what I mean — I will not have any of this back home! That is why I am terrified of even the thought of going back. Now that I saw this freedom, I do not want to loose it. It feels great! I breathe for the first time. It terrifies me to know they will take it away from me.” Anna was turning heads. “Even now, standing here with you like this, you think my parents would allow me to have this? To be here with someone like you? No! I would be on the train by now, on my way home, tied with rope if they thought I would run away. This is exactly the kind of life I can not have. What I am doing now, my parents and even my friends would consider to be very wrong. I need to be home, having a husband, raising children. That is what a Russian girl is for.”

We escaped from the cold by heading into the atrium of the Globus mall. Then, sitting in bright yellow plastic chairs, sipping the Ukrainian equivalent of Starbucks brews, Anna filled me in on the incessant texting and phoning her mother started up the minute Mikhail reported her unexpected departure.

It was news to me and given my game in Kiev was surveillance, I was a little surprised. I let her go on.

She contrasted living with her mother’s harassment to the way Galina, Luda and I seemed to live — footloose and fancy-free. She did not want to go back to being under the thumb of her family . In fact, Anna hinted at fearing for her life. “If fight for my freedom I will most certainly lose. They will catch me sooner or later. It’s just a matter of time and then it will be over for me.”

“You came here knowing it would make your life worse?” Given what was at stake for her mother, I knew she was right. Too late to feel guilty, but it didn’t stop me. “Geeze, Anna, you didn’t have to come to Kiev.”

“Oh yes, I did have to come!” She reacted like I’d just slapped her. “For once in my life I had to see what life can be. Your letters amazed me. You do such amazing things! I could never dream of doing such things. I did not know a woman is capable of such things. You are so independent and self sufficient, there are no limits for you. I wanted to meet with you from when you said you were coming to Kiev, I just did not know if I could escape. Thank you so much for rescuing me. I am not kidding, you saved me in the nick of time. I was drowning.”

“And you’re still counting on me to rescue you?”

“I have no idea what I am counting on. I just knew I had to escape. And you… You, Jess, are the greatest escape I had. You are it. You have no idea what your appearance and our relationship means to me. But there isn’t much I can do now, I have nowhere to go.”

“You mean you ran away? Geeze Anna, what would happen if you were forced back home?”

“I didn’t know what better I could do for myself. I needed to leave them all behind, they were crushing me. I couldn’t stand that bastard, Mikhail, always pawing, necking, holding, harassing, threatening me. I could not stand another minute of those lies to my mother. Saying that I will marry him and that I’ll give her grandchildren! Oh Jess, you do not know how sick I am of them, of that life! Do you know what it feels like to wake up every single day in a life that is not your own. I cannot accept it is my life. To know that is my fate is unbearable.”

“Wow, I knew it was tough, but that’s… I’m amazed they let you leave town.”

“They don’t know where I went and who I went to. More lies to that bastard. I bought a one way ticket. Left everything behind, my cat, my music, my clothes even. You see, no one could suspect I was running. I just needed to get to you here, and I didn’t think what I would do after that.”