Val Karren: The Deceit of Riches

“It’s right on the metro line and a bus line so getting to school won’t be a problem, and then you’re just two metro stops from my place. Nice and easy to get together!” She seemed pleased her new found talent as a real-estate agent.

She continued, “It’s on the ground floor, it’s rather dirty inside, we’ll have to clean it. It hasn’t any furniture, but the owner will bring some. The cost is twenty dollars, cash, each month. I think it is the best we will find. You can always move if you don’t like it after one month.” She was already convinced I would live there happily, close to her.

“Well, it couldn’t be any worse than what I am suffering through right now. That’s for sure!” I replied enthusiastically. “I can’t take another night of drunken snoring and that infernal radiator. It’s like trying to sleep in a sauna.”

Hans was washing down a chicken thigh with the locally brewed lemonade. He screwed up his face as if he had bitten into a concentrated lemon. “It’s great to have your own space!” he said rasping as he battled the strong after effect of the homemade soft drink.

Yulia picked up a chicken bone and threw it at him in jest, but also in disgust of his manners. She demanded manners from the men around her and never hid her disapproval.

“It’s settled then!” I said glancing back and forth between my two friends looking for moral support and getting none, “I’ll take the room. When can I move in?”

“Tomorrow at two o’clock,” Yulia said turning her shoulder and looking away from Frank who continued to inhale the chicken on his plate.

The next morning early, I shook hands with my roommates sober enough to be awake and headed for the trolley-bus stop on Gagarin Street carrying my bags like a pack mule. I felt like a convict walking away from the jail house after a long incarceration.

The bus took a sharp dive down the river bluff switchbacks down to the bridge over the Oka River and into the Zarechniy and Leninskiy districts, where the factory workers of the city lived, void of the old and ancient. Built up after the Great Patriotic War in the 1940s and 1950s for the mass production needed for the victorious Soviet war machine, it was a centrally planned neighborhood with identical five story apartment blocks street after street, with groves of birch trees, benches, and playgrounds between them. Now cars parked haphazardly between the trees, on curbs and sidewalks and in front of doors taking up the planned natural spaces for rest and repose after a hard day at the factory. Gone was the worker’s paradise!

“You should leave your money, passport and plane ticket with us here. This apartment is much safer than where you will be living. You’ll be on the ground floor with windows on the street. Anybody could break in and take all your things. Here on the fifth floor, it would be the last place a thief would think to break in, if he’s sober enough to climb the stairs,” was Yulia’s mother’s advice to me about living alone.

“Ok, but I must have my passport and visa with me at all times, but maybe you are right about the money stash and the plane ticket. Those would be impossible to replace,” I conceded.

“Will you have a telephone in your apartment?” Olya asked further.

“No, I don’t think so,” I looked to Yulia who shook her head no.

“If not, you will have to use the public phones at the metro station. You should not hold long conversations on the telephone. Keep your calls short and maybe even speak English when you can so nobody understands what you’re saying. Somebody is always listening and you never know what they will do,” she babbled on.

“No, he shouldn’t speak English because that will call too much attention, people will hear he is a foreigner and then target him,” Yulia contradicted her mother’s advice.

“No, I am talking about the people on the telephone line listening to him talk. People in the metro station won’t be able to hear what he is saying in Russian or English.” she rebutted her daughter. Turning back to me she continued, “You’ll want to use code words, like, the usual place, the usual time, etc. but never actually talk about specifics.”

I sat dumbfounded as I listened to this conversation between mother and daughter go on longer and longer and actually get quieter and quieter the more animated it got. Olga was looking suspiciously around her own living room to make sure nobody else was there hearing this subversive information to the unwitting foreigner. At one point, she stood up and turned on the kitchen radio to create some background noise and static so she couldn’t be overheard. The state radio station was chiming eleven o’clock. It was all just a bit surreal.

“Also, don’t talk to people on the bus or the metro. People around here are not used to having foreigners in the neighborhood. You might get unwanted attention from people who don’t like foreigners — and worse Americans!” Olga was bordering on paranoia.

“I’ve never had a problem in any part of Russia being seen and known as a foreigner. Everybody can hear it in my accent,” I said hoping to defuse the rhetoric going around the room.

“Yes, but don’t forget that the Soviet Union has many accents of Russian. You look and sound like you could be from one of the Baltic republics, Estonia maybe? And that’s okay for people, but to hear that you are a westerner, and American could cause you some trouble,” she said adamantly.

Leaving my money belt and my return plane ticket with Olga for safe keeping, Yulia and I headed down the five flights stairs to the bus stop for the short ride from Zarachenaya to Proletarskaya for our one o’clock appointment with my new landlord.

“It’s really just a simple room,” the landlord apologized as he opened the room from the corridor fumbling with the keys he obviously hadn’t used much himself.

The room was empty except for a rickety cot with a musty mattress, a wooden table with two chairs and a filthy free-standing cabinet, table top height, with drawers. My heart sank on seeing the filthy, naked state of the room.

“Of course, we will bring back the furniture that belongs in the room,” he continued after a dramatic pause. “After some cleaning, it should be livable again.”

“How soon can the furniture be brought?” Yulia asked in a confrontational voice, feeling somewhat mislead from the conversation on the telephone a few days earlier.

“We can bring a sofa-bed and a coat and hat rack, a wardrobe and a large cupboard, and a larger table and two more chairs in three weeks, because we have to borrow my brother’s delivery bus and he driving with it on a job now,” he replied with apology in his voice.

“It’s good enough,” I said with some doubt in my head, “I can camp here for a few weeks. It will be alright. I will work to fix it up.”

“It’s an inexpensive room without a land lady to clean or cook. The kitchen and bathrooms are shared with the others that live here,” was his justification for offering a dusty, empty room to rent.

“I don’t see any problem with that,” I said off hand.

“Yes, but the neighbors are Tatars. That’s why nobody else wants to rent the room,” he added cautiously.

The apartment was on the ground floor of the building and my window looked out on to Prospect Lenina, a four-lane highway leading to and from the factories on its southern extremity. Gratefully there was a pleasant strip of snow-covered grass and a grove of frosted birch trees that buffered the view from my window and the sounds and smells of the broad avenue. The entrance to the apartment was dark and cavernous as the light bulbs in the lamps in the stairwell were stolen one by one within two days of being replaced. In short order, I learned how to lock and unlock my doors by touch after I had memorized every step, chip and uneven slope on the concrete floor and just had to hope that nobody was lurking in the dark waiting for me.